


Jon Snow: What was the Point?

by DottyDot



Series: GoT Meta [1]
Category: Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Character Analysis, Meta, Nonfiction, jonerys shippers will not like
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-04
Updated: 2019-07-04
Packaged: 2020-05-13 17:07:02
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,729
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19255492
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DottyDot/pseuds/DottyDot
Summary: Making sense of Jon's character arc by talking about identity issues and his struggle between love/duty.





	Jon Snow: What was the Point?

**Short Answer** : Kit Harrington clearly put a clause in his contract that he was paid per word rather than episode this season. No, not total words spoken, each _unique_ word. That's why Jon just repeated ad nauseum “you’re muh queen,” “she’ll be a good queen,” “I don't wannit” all of season 8. HBO couldn't afford more Jon dialogue! I just made that up, but it momentarily made me feel better about what happened to his character.

**Less Short** (as in, very long) **Answer** : I didn’t particularly enjoy watching Jon get murdered a second time. That was not something I wanted to see in the GoT finale. Of course, who even knows who Jon is anymore. After the finale I thought “Wait, Jon’s character arc is really about him devolving into a dumber, weaker, sadder excuse of a man than he’s ever been before? I _guess_ I'm supposed to think that Sansa warned Jon to no avail, that he went off and instead of being like Robb and marrying the wrong girl for love, Jon decided to instead give her his kingdom? If I accept that, his stupidity makes him unfit to be king or to have any position of power again because what if he met _another_ pretty murderer? What would he give away next time? “I don’t have a country but please accept this tall ginger. Tormund, do you mind?”

Identity, who Jon is and where he belongs, is where his story begins and ends. In 1x01 Jon is a bastard with no seat at the feast, no place in the world, so he chooses to go to the Wall, searching for what he can’t find where he is. The show ends with Jon not choosing to leave it all behind but being _condemned_ to lose it all. It has taken me weeks to wrap my mind around what we saw in the finale because it didn’t resolve any of Jon’s issues, clarify what his motivations/thoughts were, connect anything to the long running themes in GoT. It wasn’t just disappointing, it was totally disorienting.

**_But_** , I have rallied, I have revitalized my defunct brain, and I have decided to _interpret_ what I saw. As in, I am going to resurrect Jon’s sorry ass (You can hear him shrieking right now, “I don’t wannit!”) whether he likes it or not. So, if you were proud of me for recanting all my unconfirmed theories after the finale, avert your eyes!

Post finale we know that Jon’s story was never about who he was to the world (nothing comes of being the heir, no one even mentions it when choosing a king), but who he wants to be, who he chooses to be. That’s the struggle with where his place is, which side he would fall on with love vs duty, if he is a Stark or Targaryen, if he is doomed by being a bastard or by his house words.

Jon, in an effort to not be an honorless bastard, in an effort to be a worthy son of Ned, chooses duty/honor over family/love when he decides _not_ to abandon the Night’s Watch to join Robb and then again when he chooses to return to the Wall, leaving Ygritte behind. What is right means keeping oaths, doing his duty, seeking honor. How seriously does he take his oaths, his honor, his duty? He risked the lives of all the Northmen, his family, and all of the Westerosi by refusing to lie to Cersei about bending the knee. In s7, more than any other season, Jon becomes honor bound and continues to double down on this in s8.

I did _not_ think this was the case before because in s7, it looked like Jon bent the knee for love, which is a betrayal of his people. That’s why I bought into a variation of the Political Jon theory.

In light of s8, it appears that D&D retconned that scene because in 8x01, Jon says he _had_ to bend the knee. I believed him until the finale when I decided “oh, Jon is a liar, it _was_ for love this whole time.” But thinking back over the whole season, that doesn’t fit in anywhere. If Jon _wouldn’t_ lie to Cersie to save humanity, he _couldn’t_ have lied to the Northern Lords, Lyanna Mormont who made him king, Sam, or his family. I wanted Jon to play the game, be darker, but nope, Jon bent the knee for the North, and he can’t tell a lie. Why am I certain? Well, in addition to the not lying to Cersei thing, D&D use the fact that Jon gave up his crown to save his people to prove his worthiness (and superiority to Dany) as a potential ruler via Sam (8x01) and then they had Arya assure us Jon did the right thing (8x04). 

I intensely dislike ambiguity as a storytelling method because it allows the creators to have it every which way, but I have never been as bothered by it as I was during s8. D&D sharpened ambiguity into a weapon to use against their audience instead of really exploring Jon’s conflicting motivations, his struggle between them, and the heartbreak of having to choose one or the other. Instead they play a game with us that went something like, “this is what he did. No, never mind, _this_ is what he did! Oh, no, you should _definitely_ still be asking why he did it. Wait, why are you questioning him? Lmao! He’s a good guy for doing it for the second reason, _of course_ that’s why he did it. See? He was right all along! Or was he?”

It’s entirely incoherent. If Jon was willing for everyone _to die_ rather than tell a lie, he is a degenerate for turning around and lying to cover his own ass. But, say he was lying to the Northern Lords, then Dany should have been furious that he made her look like she demanded their freedom in exchange for saving humanity, guaranteeing everyone in the North would hate her. That’s not the story we got. Dany didn’t react because it’s true, Jon had to choose his people or his crown. We just weren’t supposed to realize that Dany wasn’t the great liberator she claimed to be until she burned down a city. So, Jon knelt for the North, and then was duty/honor bound to Dany.

D&D were also using the ambiguity of Jon’s true motivations as part of the suspense leading to his decision to kill Dany in 8x06. That’s why they had Sansa directly ask the question about why he knelt in 8x01 without giving us an answer. We have to believe that Jon loves Dany so much that she is compromising his judgment, that he is subservient to her will, or there would be no question of him intervening to save a Stark in the finale. We needed to _not_ know where he will land for the “shock” of him killing Dany to work.

In hindsight, much of what we saw this season was preparation for Jon’s choice. The entire season placed Jon squarely between Sansa and Dany. They showcased this visually with how they framed them, they had Dany directly raise the Jon issue with Sansa, in Jon/Dany scenes Sansa consistently popped up. Sansa was present even when she didn’t appear. Throughout s8 Jon is being told to choose between the two women and he avoids doing so, until he doesn’t have the option not to. In a season of wild fluctuations, this they managed to do consistently. As Maester Aemon said, “ _in every man’s life, there comes a day when it is not easy. A day when he must choose”_ and the choice that s8 pushed for Jon was Sansa or Dany, each woman representing one side of his ongoing struggle between love and duty.

Now, the idea that he was so enamored he lost all personality, morality, verbal skills, sense of direction…well, that’s just bullshit. Lack of chemistry between Jon and Dany is _not_ what makes the whole “Jon is a fool-in-love who is brainwashed into supporting mass murder until he shakes himself out of it thanks to the advice of goodness personified Tyrion and then murders his one and only out of duty to his family” story fail. That story was never going to work when s7 set up something else and s8 _showed_ us something else until Tyrion said those words. That story would require Jon to be _unaware_ of things, and he isn’t.

If you’re telling the fool-in-love story, you don’t have the man meet the woman, realize he’s a “Northern fool” being held against his will “I’m a prisoner on this island” and _then_ become dumber. Jon (may have) loved Dany, but he wasn’t so _blindly_ in love that he didn’t know what she was. Ever since the Dragonstone beach scene in s7, Jon and Tyrion have _both_ been trying to control Dany’s instincts. Tyrion knew all along what Dany was. Jon of course did not realize the extent of it, but he did know she was dangerous, or he wouldn’t have had multiple scenes in which he is actively trying to maneuver her into taking more humane stances.

In 8x04 he does this with her plans for King’s Landing, and then on top of that, he intends to take a dragon South with his forces. Grey Worm catches him taking the piece that represents Rhaegal and moves it back to where it belongs on the map, so nothing comes of it, but the point is, stuff is going on in Jon’s head and _mindless_ infatuation isn’t one of them. That episode with his groveling and kowtowing was so over the top that there’s no explanation other than he was attempting to appease and please Dany, but since she’s his aunt he can’t exactly _please_ her anymore, so he appeases her whenever he can. This is confirmed by Dany when she kisses Jon and determines that Jon doesn’t love her (anymore?), that he’s afraid of her. Sansa had figured this out in 8x04.

In spite of all the absurdities, D&D consistently carried Jon’s morality over the seasons, and neither his affair with Dany nor Tyrion’s words change that. In 8x05 Jon orders his men to retreat from King’s Landing, risking Dany’s wrath, because he cannot participate in the slaughter of innocents. It is there _again_ in 8x06 when he confronts Grey Worm and walks through Dany’s army to speak to her. To then have him minutes later defending her actions contradicts the 7 previous seasons and most of s8. We all know that whatever mangled mess of a man D&D turned Jon into, those words in defense of Dany were so ooc for who Jon has always been and who he was in the previous scenes in that episode that they couldn’t _possibly_ be a genuine expression of the character’s thoughts. The show was simply way too consistent with this for us to believe he would ever mean such a thing. Jon’s morality is so firmly established in our minds that it was more plausible for Dany to burn King’s Landing than for Jon to defend her doing it.

A _lot_ of people have pointed out that Jon was being used as an audience insert in his scene with Tyrion so that D&D could respond directly to the questions that would inevitably be raised by Dany fans. I agree that on one level, that is certainly what was happening. D&D needed to make sure we got the picture, so they used Tyrion, their voice of goodness, to speak words of wisdom into our dark, dark hearts. No aspersions on your character, clearly I am speaking of my own. D&D were probably also very aware of what it would mean for Jon, a man, to kill Dany, a feminist icon, so, I think they were in a difficult position and wanted to justify Jon’s decision as much as possible and also lessen his resolve (aka culpability) so that he did not become too hated.

As for an in-world interpretation, we could assume that everything Jon says to Tyrion is because he’s trying to convince himself he doesn’t _need_ to kill Dany. If he can convince himself that she isn’t _that_ bad, he doesn’t have to go through with it. This flows with his interaction with Dany in the throne room scene. He is looking for any sign that she isn’t going to follow through with her plans, that he could possibly persuade her of another way of doing things. In his conversation with her, it is clear he doesn’t agree with her, it’s clear he didn’t approve of her actions in 8x05, so what he said to Tyrion was kinda sorta explainable as an argument with himself.

Something else to consider is that we saw Jon totally defeated and unlike himself once before, after his resurrection. He was prepared to leave it all, abandon Westeros to its fate, and then Sansa came along and gave him a purpose. Immediately he planned on protecting her, but he _wouldn’t_ go to war with her. In the Jon/Tyrion scene in 8x06, Jon had been destroyed all over again after being complicit in the destruction of King’s Landing, and he was, again, trying to reject taking the violent action that was being demanded of him, in this instance, killing Dany.

In s6 he says he is tired of fighting, and it’s all he’s done since he left home. By s8, he’s added to that list by fighting in the Battle of the Bastards, fighting beyond the Wall in s7, fighting in the Battle of Winterfell and in King’s Landing in s8. For a man who hates killing and was tired of it, he just did an awful lot of killing and fighting in a compressed amount of time. When I think of that being his emotional context, I can understand why he’s trying to act like Dany can do what she wants. He isn’t trying to say it’s right, he’s trying to believe he doesn’t have to kill his aunt/ex-lover/queen because he’s already mostly destroyed and this will finish him. Kinslaying is a _very_ big deal. The lens of S6 is helpful because there’s another parallel beyond the trauma and call to action. The trigger that makes him act is similar too. What eventually moves him to go to war with Sansa in s6? His brother’s life is at stake. What’s the trigger in s8? His sisters.

**Recap!** Jon isn’t an amoral idiot. He bent the knee to save the North, sees Dany’s concerning tendencies, but is too honorable to shirk his duty. He will follow Dany because Dany is his queen. His duty/honor demand that he stand by her side and fear (for his family, in 8x04 he wanted her out of the North ASAP) forces him to _obey_ until it is just too much. He defies Dany only when he realizes he’s participating in a murderous rampage, not a battle. He would rather die than kill Dany, but that’s not an option because Dany is coming for his sisters.

The next issue to address is our two quotes in the finale that happen right before the crucial act. They’re how we interpret Jon’s motivations and they’re how we will tie not only his s8 arc together, but his entire character arc, and see how it relates with GoT overall. So, my question is, how the heck does either “love is the death of duty” or “duty is the death of love” work to describe Jon’s struggle? For either to mean anything, we need _two_ sides to the equation. Dany can’t be love _and_ duty. But, to the very end, Jon is placing Dany firmly on the “my queen” (duty) side of the struggle. How then can she be love? That ruins both quotes!

To make it work the show implies it is _duty_ to the Starks, his sisters, that makes Jon kill his love (Dany), but no one can look at Jon and Arya's interaction and say, yep, in Jon's head, Arya is duty. Arya is emphatically Jon’s _family_ , more so than anyone else ever was. And, in the original conversation with Maester Aemon, family/love is on one side and duty/honor the other.

Maester Aemon: _“Love is the death of duty. If the day should ever come when your Lord Father was forced to choose between honor on the one hand, and those he loves on the other, what would he do?”_

 and

 " _What is honor compared to a woman’s love? What is duty against the feel of a newborn son in your arms? Or a brother’s smile?”_

 So, where does Arya fall for Jon? Family/love? Or duty/honor? Killing Dany is dishonorable, it is undutiful, it is treasonous. For Jon, Dany is the duty/honor in this scenario.

In 8x06 Jon is the one who brings up “love is the death of duty.” That's where his head goes when Tyrion is explaining why he needs to stop Dany. It is Tyrion who flips the expression: _“Sometimes, duty is the death of love.”_

Jon looks at him, and Tyrion continues, _"You are the shield that guards the realms of men. You always try to do the right thing, no matter the cost. You've tried to protect people. Who's the greatest threat to the people now? It's a terrible thing I'm asking. It's also the right thing. Do you think I'm the last man she'll execute? Who is more dangerous than the rightful heir to the Iron Throne?"_

Jon gets up, _"That's her decision. She is the queen."_ He puts his hand on Tyrion's shoulder, _"I'm sorry, I can't do this."_

Jon refuses to be the shield that guards the realms of men. He will not fight for himself. Neither the realm nor self-preservation will move him. Why? Well, earlier in their conversation when Tyrion tried to get Jon to condemn what Dany did, he won't, and Tyrion says, “You won't say because you don't want to  _betray_  her.” All of the “my queen” and “she’s our queen” and his reaction to hearing his parentage and calling it “treason,” none of it is ever couched in terms of love. It all comes back to Jon bending the knee to Dany. She is his _queen_. She is his  _duty_. Serving her faithfully is how he maintains his  _honor_. 

For the sake of duty/honor, he won't criticize her, he refused to compare her decisions to his unfavorably, he refused to even entertain his own claim. He silenced his conscience and watched Varys burn, was prepared for Tyrion to die, was willing to die himself. Just like Ned in s1, Jon doesn't fear for his own life. What moves Ned to lie and dishonor himself? Sansa. He calls himself a traitor to save her. What triggers Jon to act? The Stark girls. Arya reminds Jon in the previous scene that Sansa won't kneel and Tyrion mentions his sisters. As a last resort to get Jon to act, Tyrion tells Jon that Sansa doesn’t want Dany to be queen and that Jon has to _“ choose.”_ What did Aemon say?

_“We’re all human. We all do our duty when there’s no cost to it. Honor comes easy then. Yet, sooner or later, in every man’s life, there comes a day when it is not easy. A day when he must choose.”_

Arya is in King’s Landing, the instinct would be to have her refuse to kneel to Dany’s face because direct confrontation is more dramatic than conversations about it. But D&D don’t do that because it _had_ to be Sansa who’s the trigger to bring things full circle. The choice is love or duty, Sansa or Dany, because this means Jon has to make the same choice Ned did: Sansa’s life or his honor. Ned and Jon both _choose_ Sansa over their honor.

The end of Jon’s arc is an echo of Ned’s. Ned lied to everyone, committed treason by protecting Jon. He chose family over his honor. He chose love of his sister over duty to his king. Jon chose love for his sister over duty to his queen. He too committed treason with bonus crimes/sins thrown in because he’s an overachiever.

Jon has struggled between his duty to the Night’s Watch and his desire to protect the Starks in the past. He chose duty before, so killing Dany is the long delayed/denied opportunity with much higher stakes and in a much more traumatizing scenario. He is torn between what he wants to do for love and the demands of duty, but this time, duty doesn’t stop him. For Ned and Jon both, love dictates their choice to abandon honor and forsake their duty.

That’s how parentage reveal ties into this. It certainly wasn’t there to get Jon on the throne, it wasn’t just there to make Dany crazy, it had to happen because Jon needed to know not just who he is, but who Ned was. Ned wasn’t the honorable man who always did his duty. Ned was a treasonous liar. Ned chose his family, he chose love. That’s the only way Jon isn’t going to spend the rest of his life hating himself. In time, he will be able to recognize that the man he has always wanted to be a worthy son of didn’t choose duty/honor either.

I don’t think this is an unfair interpretation of the finale because of how much they reference that conversation between Jon and Maester Aemon. D&D made Jon’s motivations uncertain because surprising us is more important than character development/reasonable story progression, but these ideas are too imbedded for this to have been entirely incidental. When Tyrion talks to Jon later in 8x06, Jon is wrestling with the question, was killing Dany “ _right_.” What was Jon’s answer to Aemon?

_Aemon: “Love is the death of duty. If the day should ever come when your Lord Father was forced to choose between honor on the one hand, and those he loves on the other, what would he do?”_

_Jon: “He would do whatever is right, no matter what.”_

In season 8 Jon learned that Ned lied and committed treason, denying honor and duty, for love of his sister, for love of Jon. I think the audience knows that Ned was right. So, I don’t care what Tyrion thinks motivates Jon, and I’m rejecting the ambiguity that D&D prefer. In the end, Ned and Jon made the same choice. They chose family, they chose love. They both did what was _right_.

This interpretation means that s8 _did_ address Jon’s identity struggle in its own way and this is again foreshadowed by the same Jon/Aemon scene:

_Jon: “Who are you?”_

_Aemon: “My father was Maekar, the first of his name. My brother Aegon reigned after him when I had refused the throne, and he was followed by his son Aerys, whom they called the Mad King.”_

_Jon: “You’re Aemon Targaryen.”_

_Aemon: “I am a Maester of the Citadel, bound in service to Castle Black and the Night’s Watch.”_

Aemon’s response is peculiar. He tells Jon who his family is, but when Jon identifies him as a Targaryen, as a member of that family, Aemon responds with his identity as dictated by his oaths, by duty, by honor. Aemon was not allowed to choose his family because _“The gods were cruel when they saw fit to test my vows. They waited until I was old”_ and as a result, Aemon is nothing but his duty. We all felt that with Jon in s8. We have ragged on him for not having a personality, not thinking, and not speaking. He barely existed as himself because all he was this season was duty. That is, until his day came, and on that day, he chose his family/love instead.

Arya tells Jon he’s family in 8x01, in 8x04 Jon tells Dany she is his _queen_ but the Starks are his _family_ , and then Jon chooses his family over Dany in 8x06. Arya threatens to kill Yara, and Sansa is willing to go to war to save Jon. Arya said Jon is her brother, and Sansa has said multiple times that Jon is a Stark to her. Their actions in the finale prove that they fully accept Jon as one of them, and ultimately, Jon does not allow himself to be subsumed by duty. He chooses his family, as they chose him. This is resolution for us and for Jon, even if the show refused to make it explicit. Jon may never say the words, but they’ve been spoken for him. He is a Stark.

And, not only does Jon’s choice tie his arc to Ned’s, uniting the first and last seasons to give us something akin to closure, we can fold the whole series back on itself and see how the beginning and end align. This interpretation means the first and last episodes of the whole series are talking about the same idea which we can trace throughout each season for _many_ characters (Ned, Catelyn, Olenna, Cersei, Jaime, Tyrion, Sansa…) not just Jon: family and what we do for them.

In 8x02 we’re reminded of a certain infamous quote from the very first episode when Sansa, Dany, and Jon are shown together as Bran says, _“the things we do for love.”_ What do they each do for love this season? In the same episode Dany admits she came North for love of Jon. In the finale, Sansa goes South to save Jon. What does Jon do for love?

If Dany is Jon’s love, becoming complicit in mass murder and justifying it is what he does for love. That doesn’t resonate with the ideas presented in the show previously or with Jon’s character arc. However, if we keep duty/honor on the one side and family/love on the other for the finale, if Dany is duty/honor and the Starks/Sansa are family/love, what happens unites the beginning and end of the show via two shocking acts and our two significant quotes, _“The things we do for love”_ and _“Love is the death of duty.”_

In 1x01 Jaime attempts to kill Bran. In 8x06 Jon kills Dany.

Jaime tried to kill for his sister, Jon _does_ kill for Sansa.

The things we do _for love_.

Who is Jon? Jon goes from a bastard boy with no seat at the feast to man of the Night's Watch, Lord Commander, (dead!), King in the North, Warden of the North, heir to the Iron Throne, kinslayer, exile. Where does Jon belong? At home, in Winterfell with the people he loves and calls family. To be forced to leave it behind is the cost of his choice. Jon's end is bitter, but, viewing it this way, it isn’t pointless. Even if he’s standing in the same place, Jon didn’t end up where he began because now, he knows who he is.

All those years ago Maester Aemon told him, “ _You must make that choice yourself and live with it for the rest of your days. As I have.”_ Jon’s day came, and he chose. He chose the Starks, his family, those he loves. That’s a choice Jon will have to live with for the rest of his days, but it is a choice that he will be _able_ to live with.

My review of Jon is that the writers failed him this season, but he’s still there, beneath all the misdirection, the pointless foreshadowing, and the bizarre character zigzags (instead of arcs). Again, I know that this is an _interpretation_ , but it provides more consistency and meaning to the events of the finale and Jon’s character than we have otherwise. I am not going to claim that D&D did this intentionally, but I wanted to make the argument for it.

So, in spite of it all, even though it’s taken me weeks to find signs of life, I am declaring that Jon Snow lives. As a smart woman once said, Jon is Jon. Call me delusional, but I think that Jon is _still_ Jon.

 

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted on Quora here  
> https://www.quora.com/What-is-your-review-of-the-Game-of-Thrones-character-Jon-Snow/answer/Esther-Dot


End file.
